Company of Liars (19 page)

‘So if you are as innocent as you claim, why run away?’ Zophiel said, ignoring Abel.

‘Be fair, Zophiel,’ I said. ‘Running away is no proof of guilt. You saw that mob; their blood was up. Do you think they'd have taken him off for a fair trial? By the time they'd handed him over to the sheriff there wouldn't have been a lot left of him to hang, guilty or innocent. If I'd been in his shoes, I'd have run too.’

The swan-boy nodded vigorously. ‘He's right. I was scared, and with good reason. I think I may have seen the man who killed the child and he knows I saw him. I think it was him who said he'd seen me with the child to cover his own tracks.’

‘We all saw you with the child,’ Zophiel snapped. ‘As did half the town.’

‘No, you don't understand. I saw a man leaving that warehouse about the time the little girl went missing. He was looking up and down the street as if he wanted to make sure it was empty. I was standing in a doorway sheltering from the rain. He wouldn't have seen me at first. I only noticed him because there was a little dog jumping up at him, barking. He kicked it away really viciously. That made me angry. I thought the dog looked familiar, but it wasn't until after the child was found I realized… I had no reason to think at the time…’

‘Then why not tell your story to the authorities?’ Zophiel demanded. ‘You saw his face, I take it. You could describe him.’

‘I saw his face all right; he walked past the door where I was standing. He saw me too when he drew level and looked none too happy about it either.’

‘Then I repeat my question.’

‘Because I saw something else, an emblem on his cloak. If it was his cloak, he was Master of the Guild of Cordwainers. Do you think the townspeople would take the word of an itinerant storyteller against a fellow townsman, especially one who's the master of such a wealthy guild?’

Zophiel raised one eyebrow. ‘And do you think that we are more gullible than the townspeople, that we'd believe such a fanciful tale, where they would not? How convenient
that you just happened to be hanging around, watching the very warehouse where the child was murdered.’

‘But I did see the cordwainer there.’

‘If
you saw him, I dare say he had gone there to inspect a consignment of leather. What could be more natural at market time? He had a perfectly legitimate reason for being in a warehouse, unlike a vagabond storyteller who could only have been there with nefarious intent. At the very least, you obviously intended to steal. Did the child see you stealing and threaten to tell? Is that why you killed her? Or did you lure the child to the warehouse in order to rape her and murder her?’

‘The child was strangled, Zophiel,’ I reminded him. ‘Hard to do that with a wing.’

‘He has a hand also. It's easy enough for a man to throttle a small child with just one hand. The fingers on his hand will be stronger than most, for he has to do everything with that one hand.’

‘Can he fly?’ Old Walter suddenly blurted out from his place at the fireside. He'd been rubbing his eyes and staring at the storyteller's wing ever since the cloak was pulled off, as he if thought that what he was seeing was an illusion brought on by drink.

‘'Course he can't, you daft old pisspot. How do you expect him to fly with only one wing?’ his son snapped, as if winged men regularly made an appearance in his house.

‘These folks said he got out of the town when all the gates were closed. So maybe he flew out.’

Zophiel addressed himself to the swan-boy. ‘He has a point; how exactly did you get out?’

‘I stowed away… on your wagon.’

‘You did what?’ Zophiel screamed. All the colour seemed
to drain from his face. He seized the swan-boy by the front of his shirt, almost lifting him off his feet.

‘If you've damaged anything, boy, I'll string you up myself.’

He pushed the boy aside, who fell heavily to the floor, and rushed to the door, cursing as he swung aside the heavy brace. Rodrigo helped the storyteller to his feet, gripping his shoulder firmly but gently, in case he should make a bolt for the open door, but he made no move to escape.

‘Zophiel lives in fear of someone damaging his mermaid and his other precious boxes, though God alone knows what he has in there that is so precious,’ I said by way of explanation, for Abel and his father were staring at the open door as if they thought Zophiel had gone mad.

The storyteller took a breath as if he was about to say something, but seemed to think better of it and quickly closed his mouth again.

‘I hope for your sake nothing is damaged, lad,’ I continued, ‘otherwise you'll wish you were back with that mob. What do they call you anyway?’

‘Cygnus.’

‘Well then, Cygnus, there's a scraping of beans left in that pot, so you may as well settle down and eat. Whatever's to be done with you, can't be done till morning. No sense in going hungry while there's food to be eaten. This is going to be a long night for us all.’

The door was barred once more and we all settled down around the fire on the beaten earth floor, hunkered down on pieces of old sacking or logs, for the cottager only had a small bench and a single stool to his name. We were packed as tight as eels in a barrel, but grateful for our full bellies and the soporific heat of the spitting fire.

After careful inspection, Zophiel had been forced to admit that nothing in the wagon had been damaged, but his anger had, if anything, increased. He had unwittingly given shelter to a fugitive by refusing to allow his wagon to be searched and he took that as an insult to his pride. He was determined not to be made a fool of twice and was all for lashing the prisoner to one of the wagon wheels to spend the night outside in the rain, but the rest of us stopped him. Our hosts had no objections to the boy being housed in the cottage; in fact they seemed positively to welcome the idea, fascinated as they were by him. So Zophiel, unable to punish the boy as he would have liked, took to goading him instead.

‘Tell us the truth, boy,’ he said, ‘and don't try your swan-prince or cordwainer tales on us – we are not a bunch of children. That is a false wing, is it not, a trick to get a few more pennies from the townsfolk than they'd pay you for a good tale? I imagine you managed to convince many fools that it's real, but don't you try to take me for a fool as well.’

Cygnus glanced nervously round the group. ‘It's a long story.’

‘We're not going anywhere and neither are you, boy,’ Zophiel said grimly.

Adela smiled at Cygnus encouragingly and with a scared glance at Zophiel, he addressed himself to her.

‘I was born with one good arm and one… one that was not an arm. It was a stump just a few inches long, with six tiny projections from it spread out in a line at its base, like the buds of pinion feathers. It was as well that my mother gave birth alone for if a goodwife had been present and had seen what my mother had birthed she'd have never allowed me to draw my first breath. My mother said she's known
many do that, for they know a crippled child brings nothing but trouble to a family.’

Zophiel snapped, ‘Only God can say if a child should live or die. Such women should be brought to a gallows. If I had my way no woman would be permitted to attend a birth.’ He glared across at Pleasance who shrank further into her corner.

‘They're not heartless women,’ Cygnus protested. ‘They don't want a child to live in suffering or its mother to be blamed. I've seen mothers hounded from the village or worse still tried as witches, accused of fornicating with a demon. There's no mercy shown to either mother or child then; baby and mother hanged together.’

‘And such women should be tried as witches, for how else would such a monster be conceived? Not through them lying with their God-given husbands, that's for sure,’ Zophiel snapped.

‘You just said a baby was innocent. But now you want to hang the baby with its mother,’ Adela said, her face flushed, though whether from indignation or the heat of the stuffy room was hard to tell.

‘I said nothing of innocence, Adela.’ Zophiel's tone, as ever, grew quieter and colder as others become more heated. ‘What I said was that God would decide if the brat lived or died. If the mother is guilty, then the child is a demon and must die. Surely not even you would be foolish enough to plead for a demon to be spared the gallows, however seemingly innocent its form? But if the mother is not guilty her trial will prove her so. God will protect the innocent and save them from death.’

‘Like he saves them from the pestilence?’ Jofre said savagely.

There was an uncomfortable silence. Osmond crossed
himself. No one looked at anyone else. It was the question that was in everyone's mind, the one question no one could bring themselves to answer.

I nudged Cygnus with my staff. ‘You were telling us about your birth. How is it that your mother gave birth alone with no one to attend her?’

There was a collective release of breath as if we had all momentarily looked over the edge of a cliff and had now drawn back to safer ground.

‘My mother,’ his eyes flicked nervously in the direction of Zophiel, ‘my mother knew that I would be special.’

Zophiel snorted. ‘How did she know? Did an angel appear to her?’

Cygnus seemed to wilt under his sarcastic tongue. ‘Not an angel,’ he muttered.

‘A dream, then,’ Adela suggested eagerly.

‘She saw… she thought that a swan came to her, by night. The night before she was married…’

‘I've heard that if you see something frightening you can often give birth to a mon…’ Adela corrected herself hastily, ‘to an unusual child. There was a woman in our town that was frightened by a bear when she was carrying and when the baby was born it was covered from head to foot in thick black hair.’

‘I didn't mean my mother was frightened by a swan, she –’

Zophiel was staring at him, comprehension dawning and horror with it. Zophiel was hostile enough to the boy already without believing that he was the product of some bestial encounter between a bird and virgin. That would be all Zophiel needed to pronounce him guilty – a beast who murders little children. What else would be born from such a union?

I leaped in quickly. ‘So because of the strange
dream
she had, your mother thought you would be special? Is that why she chose to give birth alone?’

Cygnus grimaced. ‘She knew I would be different, but she wanted me. She always told me that.’

I glanced at Osmond; his expression was strained. I guessed he was not thinking of Cygnus, but of his own unborn child.

‘It is a wonderful thing to grow up knowing you are wanted,’ I said, and for the first time that evening Cygnus smiled, staring into the middle of the fire as if he could see his mother's face gazing lovingly back at him from the flames. Finally, after a long pause, he resumed his tale.

‘On the night I was born, my mother's husband lay sleeping in the bed beside her. When the pains came upon her, my mother betrayed them to no one. Without a word she rose and left the cottage. It was a clear night, still and cold, the ground covered in frost that sparkled blue in the moonlight. My mother slipped silently between the shadows of silver birches, until she reached the dark waters of the lake. There, among the rushes, she made a nest for herself. She was alone, yet not lonely, for watching over her was the Swan that swims upon the River of Heaven some call the Milky Way. And so beneath the Swan stars I was born. And for that constellation I was named. She wrapped me in down to keep me warm and sang to me as the silver waters of the lake lapped softly at her feet.

‘When at dawn she returned to the cottage, my mother's husband took one look at me and said I was a useless mouth to feed. He said my mother should take me back to the lake and drown me. But my mother kept me safe from him. He stayed for a few months, but as soon as I began to try to crawl, as soon as my stump could no longer be concealed
beneath swaddling bands, he left to set up home with an alewife at the other end of the village. We saw him most days, but he chose not to see us.

‘My mother worked. She worked as hard as ten women. She was a dairymaid by day and at night she spun wool and wove cloth to sell. She was so accustomed to spinning and weaving she could do it in the dark. The little light that filtered in from the torches in the yard was all she needed, so we didn't waste rushlights. And every night as she spun, she sang me to sleep with songs of the lake.

‘For as long as she could, she kept me by her side and away from the other children. When I began to walk she kept me tethered to a post inside the byre, so that I wouldn't stray outside, but eventually I learned to untie myself even with my one hand. I started to explore and found other children. It wasn't long before I realized that I wasn't like them. Even had I not worked that out for myself, they wasted no time in telling me. One day my mother found me in a corner of the byre, beating my little stump with a stick and sobbing. It was then that she told me the story of my wonderful birth and explained that my little buds would soon sprout feathers and grow into a beautiful white wing, just like a swan's.

‘I was delighted that I was to grow a wing of shining feathers, that to me seemed better than any arm and I couldn't wait to tell the other children. But when I told them, they just laughed and teased me all the more. From then on, they grabbed hold of me every day, pulling up my shirt to see if my feathers had grown yet and mocking and kicking me when they saw my stump was as bare as ever. But when I ran home crying to my mother she said, have faith, little swan, the feathers will come, if you want them enough, they will come. But however hard I wished for
feathers, the skin remained pink and naked, like a newborn rat's.

‘I used to set myself tests. If I see seven magpies today, then in the morning the wing will have begun to grow. If I eat only herbs for a week… if it rains for three days, if… if… And every day, when there was no sign of feathers, the children laughed more and I cried harder. At last my mother could bear it no longer. She went to the lake where she had birthed me and begged the swans for some of their feathers for their little brother and out of them she made me a wing and fastened it to my stump so that I could see what I would become. She said, if I could feel it, then I would believe it and have faith enough in it to make it happen. And so I did, for once I began to wear the wing, I knew what it felt like to have a wing. And so my buds sprouted into feathers and my stump grew into a wing, just as she said it would.’